Varanasi civic body collects property tax worth Rs 3 crore in 9 days

According to coordinator of computer cell of VMC Sandeep Srivastava, the corporation had on November 11 announced that it would accept arrears and current house and water taxes in the scrapped currency.TNN | November 23, 2016, 15:00 IST

VARANASI: The recent demonetization move may have caused inconvenience to the common man but proved to be a major money spinner for Varanasi Municipal Corporation (VMC), which has succeeded in collecting over Rs 3 crore tax in nine days.

After the government's announcement that people can pay taxes in demonetized currency notes until midnight of November 24, people rushed to local civic offices to pay property tax, thus resulting in a phenomenal jump in bill collections. The tax collection process began from November 11.

According to coordinator of computer cell of VMC Sandeep Srivastava, the corporation had on November 11 announced that it would accept arrears and current house and water taxes in the scrapped currency. Since then, VMC collected Rs. 2.76 crore in taxes till November 19.

The daily collection of department has increased manifold. "We have registered enormous footfall in the first few days and people continue to come in large numbers to pay their bills with the demonetized notes," he said, adding that the payment was made only in Rs 500 and Rs 1000 currencies and that 90% of the tax payers were defaulters.

VMC managed to collect just Rs 1.95 lakh in November 2015 while it has collected about Rs 3.51 crore between November 1 and 20 this year after the Centre's demonetization move. Against the total income of Rs 19.30 crore from April-November collected last year, VMC had collected Rs 24.34 crore so far with 10 days still left.

Meanwhile, Jal Kal had managed to collect Rs 3.14 crore as water tax till November 18.